How others will see it. Jewel Robbery and pre-Code go hand in hand, and it was films like this one that caused the pushback of the joy-killing Production Code. During the years of the Production Code, Jewel Robbery could not be shown and had to be shelved, and two generations of cinephiles were unable to see it.
But it is regularly shown on Turner Classic Movies, and is thus accessible to lovers of pre-Code cinema. They enjoy this naughty movie. At imdb.com, it has a relatively high user rating of 7.2 out of 10, and a nearly 3K user vote total, a sizeable number for an early talkie.
How I felt about it. Despite being made 45 years apart, Jewel Robbery reminds me of Smokey and the Bandit (1977). A cool, cavalier criminal gets away unpunished for his crimes, all the while romancing a legally innocent woman and turning her into an accomplice. He is pursued by lawful, but pompous and stupid men.
Perhaps the dreaded Production Code gets a bad rap. Perhaps criminals aren't the sauve and lovable rascals we would like them to be. It should be noted that Best Picture Oscar winners from the thirty or so years of the Production Code tend to be better than those made before or after. We also note that in Quentin Tarantino's best films, the violent criminals typically eventually get what's coming to them.
Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that Jewel Robbery is a particularly good film, and it's probably because it is so ridiculously amoral. It is good because it is funny, and it is funny because it flouts our concepts of right and wrong. Besides, Clarence Wilson never enjoyed himself so much as he does here, after unwittingly smoking a reefer.
It is interesting that the director is William Dieterle, best known for his dramas and romance movies, and not for his comedies. The exception is A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), a surreal Shakespearian comedy in which James Cagney is turned into a jackass by a preteenaged Mickey Rooney.
But the first-billed screenwriter, Erwin Gelsey, was clearly in his element, despite the fact that Jewel Robbery was only his second screenplay. He wrote numerous comedies during the 1930s, and some of them were fairly good, such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Swing Time (1936). Dieterle was born in Germany, and Gelsey in Poland, and perhaps the two immigrants discussed the present movie together in German.
An unintentionally amusing aspect of Jewel Robbery is the speech impediment of its lead, Kay Francis. She had well-known difficulties with the letter R, thus she pronounces robber as wobbah, and robbery as wobbawee. Helen Vinson, who eventually appeared in 40 films, makes her debut here, and, remarkably, is third billed.
This was William Powell's fourth movie with Francis, and reportedly, he initially wasn't keen on making it, as he had scheduled a vacation with his wife Carole Lombard. That all changed after he read the script, and decided it would be fun to play a criminal instead of yet another hero solving a crime.